You have a head and a heart
The complexity of living and working today demands freedom from binary thinking. Seeing that little is really either/or or right/wrong, but rather maybe. Traditional approaches to leadership suggest developing a specific way you’ll show up in the career context, sticking to that, and letting the rest of you be alive only in the remaining facets of your life.
One goal of my work is to debunk that approach and encourage leadership that includes more of you, not less.
I cringe at the mention of a “balanced approach,” because it suggests you bring all of who you are to every situation. Instead, I advocate for knowing the fullness of who you are and choosing when to bring which parts of you forward. This is essentially leading in an integrative way.
First, you have to be able to know and differentiate the different parts within yourself. Then, you can link those parts together in creative ways for a wider expression of your leadership that honors the nuance and complexity of each challenge.
Differentiating your head and your heart
Two parts of every person that can seem at odds with one another are the head and the heart — the logic and the feeling centers in you. Differentiating these parts means building a relationship with each part within you and seeing the value each brings to your life and leadership.
The value of your head
Logic has its limits, but your head has a valuable part to play in your leadership.
Your head is the part of you that can:
Evaluate things and determine what’s working and what’s not.
Learn about the industry you work in to discover opportunities.
Strategically build toward a vision you have for yourself, even when that vision is far off in time.
Support your direct reports to view problems differently and navigate toward creative solutions.
Build a business case for the programs you’re wanting to build and sponsor within your organization.
The one check necessary with logic is to know what drives your logic. Some “logical” ideas are really outdated conventional practices that do not translate to your experience. Setting an intention for any facet of your leadership is supercharge for the logic you incorporate.
The value of your heart
We’ve been told the head is the only part of you that has any place at work. The pandemic has shown us how much that suggestion breaks down in high stress and uncertainty. That experience forced an undeniable sense of shared humanity. And because of how uncertain things were day to day, logic met its limits.
The heart gets a bad reputation because we conflate having emotion with reacting emotionally.
Leaving emotions too far out of the equation, however, can rob you of the very fabric of life and leadership — connection to self and others.
Your heart is the part of you that can:
Determine what’s important to you and build a life that honors that.
Provide an initial cue that something needs to change.
Build a compelling story that sells people into your vision.
Connect across differences and collaborate toward shared goals.
Pull you into the uncomfortable territory where growth and change occur.
The heart meets its limits when your emotions drive your behavior without getting to know or tending to your emotions. Leading with emotions, absent of logic, can keep you in things that are no longer working for you or that prevent you from making solid business decisions. I see this present when female leaders hold onto direct reports because of loyalty or guilt, even after they’re no longer a match for the work, for example.
Weave the two parts together
Once differentiated, you can integrate these two parts of yourself to lead with more satisfaction and better results. In my leadership, I want to be both skillful and heartful. The simplest way to do this is to check in with both parts of myself before deciding what to do.
If you tend to focus on your head, develop a practice of regularly checking in with your heart. When you respond to something, you might ask yourself how you feel. When you create something, you might ask yourself what feelings come up for you in what you are creating.
If you tend to focus on your heart, you might want to invoke your ability to source and leverage information in your leadership. This looks like moving beyond feeling burnt out toward tracking what’s draining or contributing positively to your energy and coming up with experiments. Or seeing that you’re really proud of a particular accomplishment and looking critically at what evoked that pride so you can invite similar scenarios into your leadership. Or seeing frustration and knowing something is broken, so you can move toward mapping out a process and understanding fail points to create solutions and alleviate some of the frustration.
Call for reflection:
How solid is your relationship with your head and your heart? What might support both of these parts being alive in your leadership?
Shine On,
Alicia
(Image by Nadezhda Moryak via Pexels)